The present disclosure, generally, relates to data analysis, more particularly, to techniques for checking a search query used for retrieving information from a collection of records in a data analysis system.
Since a huge amount of data being recorded day by day, moment by moment in a variety of domains, a lot of efforts have been made to develop techniques to extract meaningful information from a collection of records. Event sequence analysis is technology for retrieving a meaningful pattern from event sequence data. Example of such event sequence data may include clinical data in hospitals, message data in social networking services, etc.
Search queries used in the event sequence analysis may include one or more predicates, each of which is used to retrieve a list for a key-value pair, and constraints between two predicates, each of which is used to extract pairs of elements having some temporal relationship from the lists for the two predicates.
Due to its complexity, typically, there has been developed a graphical user interface, on which a user can create a search query instinctively to extract a desired pattern from the event sequence data. However, in the typical graphical user interface, a combination of user's operations on a query may cause a kind of query that would lead to an unexpected result for the user. Such practically useless queries are considered as invalid even though it is syntactically correct, i.e., it may give some result regardless of the intention of the user.
In relation to graphical user interfaces for creating search queries, it has been developed a visual query interface for creating queries on sequences of data based on regular expressions (e.g., E. Zgraggen et al. (slqu)eries: Visual Regular Expressions for Querying and Exploring Event Sequences. CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 2683-2692. 2015). In this literature, a touch based system that exposes the full expressive power of regular expressions in an approachable way and interleaves query specification with result visualizations has been proposed. However, the literature does not mention aforementioned invalidity of resultant query.
What is needed is computer-implemented methods, associated computer systems and computer program products, capable of checking validity of a search query so as not to give a result inconsistent with intention of a user, without actually issuing the search query.